About the Author
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804 in Salem Massachusetts. His strict Puritan upbringing served as a source for many of his works, including his most famous novels The Scarlett Letter and The House of Seven Gables. Specifically, his ancestor William was persecuted for his religious beliefs and another ancestor was a judge in the “Salem Witch Trials” in which many people were tried and condemned as witches are direct sources for these novels. At an early age, Nathaniel’s father passed away at sea in which his mother raised him and his two siblings. Additionally, a leg injury rendered him immobile for quite sometime. It is during this time that his love for reading and thinking begin to emerge. In 1821, he attended Bowdoin College with the help of his wealthy uncles whose classmates included fellow writer, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and future U.S. president Franklin Pierce. After graduating from Bowdoin, he returned to his mother’s house in Salem in which he remained secluded for twelve years. Hawthorne wrote many stories and sketches during this period of isolation, viewing it as a dark and strange time of his life. Most of his short stories in the beginning of his literary career were published anonymously before he gained popularity. It was his Salem neighbor, Sophia Peabody who brought him out of this dark time of his life whom he married in 1842. In 1846, he got a job as a surveyor only to be fired two years later. This, however, proved to be a positive occurrence since it provided him the time for him to write his best work, The Scarlett Letter. His most productive years were from 1850 to 1853 in which he wrote The House of Seven Gables, The Bilthedale Romance, A Wonder Book, and Tanglewood Tales. At this time, Hawthorne and Melville became close friends. In 1852, he was appointed as an American consul in Europe by his friend Franklin Pierce in Liverpool, England. At this time, Hawhtorne’s health declined rapidly and died in Plymouth New Hampshire on May 19, 1864. Fun facts about the Author 1. Hawthorne was a friend with a number of Transcendentalists, including Emerson and Thoreau, though he never fully embraced their views. But that didn’t create any bad blood. Emerson was a pallbearer at Hawthorne’s funeral. 2. Herman Melville dedicated his great novel Moby Dick to Hawthorne, his good friend. In 2006, after 142 years of separation, Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife Sophia were finally reunited—or at least their body remains were. Hawthorne died in 1864 and was buried in the Author’s Ridge at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts (along with Concord’s finest Romantic writers: Thoreau, Alcott, and Emerson). However, Sophia, who outlived her husband by seven years, died while living in London, and so did their daughter Una. Hawthorne’s great grandchild 93-year old Joan Deming Ensor consented that the bones of Hawthorne’s wife and daughter be brought from England to Concord and buried with Hawthorne. A ceremony took place June 26, 2006. "